Not calm not cleaved not clasped not captured — no — ripples snarling at ripples, snag-rip-rip snap-burn,
watery breakages birthing more breakages, skin of the water riddled, punctured, ulcered, dirty, dirty with
sandmouth froth, gasping mudgrit sugar, drying, blistering, splitting open under the rank huff of sun-glare,
slathered onto it, pinned and sweating, a baked smear of restless glint, not calm, not borne, not blessed,
the forlorn slumping greenery withering inside itself, bending inside its own tired music, stalks sighing, stalks snapping,
a mourning too bored to finish itself, a green that dies without screaming —
I can stare I can spill my sight like sour wine across it all, not too focused no not punctured not neatly not with the gunmetal tubes of binoculars, no focus no cruelty just blunt smear gaze, fog-bloated, skin-hearing,
clear because blunted, clear because fat, clear because it forgets to aim —
the true is the haze is the mammoth is the open wound the sack the rupture the fold,
it is large not like a mountain but like a collapse,
only taken in only smothered only melting against the lip of the gut, no focus, no fixing,
sitting, slumped, greased into the ruffle of the close-world, the sticky maw of the at-hand,
greeted by the crusty sweetness, the spoiling sweetness, the fly-bitten, sun-fat sweetness of things,
Lazy?
No — swollen — violently marinated — swollen with the heave and slump of crested mobility,
poured, ladled, ladled, ladled, goaded over the fossil heat of everything before, the old bones, the hunched old wealth of it,
laid over, skin to skin, grief over grief, old light pressed into stale skins,
Rising — yes — but stuttering, gasping, crawling up the slick sides of itself,
changing like meat changes, like wet bread changes,
a float, a glut, inside the un-ending cube, the square that eats its own sides,
top-bottom top-bottom breathing against each other with no seam no escape no flare,
not rooted not rootless not flying not drowning just bloated there in the sameness of the soft,
the flesh-colored drift of sameness, the ache that forgets its own edges,
a softness so total it no longer feels soft, only swollen, only spilling,
only endlessly gutting itself into the next fold the next sag the next same.
-- Yanis Iqbal is currently studying at Aligarh Muslim University, India. His poems have been published in outlets such as Radical Art Review, Cafe Dissensus, Culture Matters, Palestine Chronicle, Live Wire, Frontier Weekly, Youth Ki Awaaz, and Indian Periodical. Two of his poems were also selected for inclusion in the Anthology of Contemporary Poetry: Meet the Poets of Today.